Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art has aced outdoor music presentations with its Tuesdays on the Terrace series, most recently featuring the string trio Hear In Now performing strong yet sensitive chamber jazz. Drawing a thoroughly diversified crowd to enjoy fresh, creative music in open space on a summer afternoon for free (food and beverages extra) shouldn't be difficult, but it's the kind of programming New York's Museum of Modern Art tried off and on for decades, seldom conquering the format's challenges.
Cellist Tomeka Reid, violinist … [Read more...]

The AACM -- Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians -- continues after 45 years to encourage highly original, edgy and exciting artists -- as I detail in my new City Arts column. Examples in New York City: reedist/composer Henry Threadgill's Zooid performs tonight and tomorrow at Roulette; trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith's 22-piece Silver Orchestra and the duo of keyboardist-singer Amina Claudine Myers and drummer Reggie Nicholson are the bill for the AACM-New York''s concluding concert of its fall 2010 season on … [Read more...]

Howard Mandel

I'm a Chicago-born (and after 32 years in NYC, recently repatriated) writer, editor, author, arts reporter for National Public Radio, consultant and nascent videographer -- a veteran freelance journalist working on newspapers, magazines and websites, appearing on tv and radio, teaching at New York University and elsewhere, consulting on media, publishing and jazz-related issues. I'm president of the Jazz Journalists Association, a non-profit membership organization devoted to using all media to disseminate news and views about all kinds of jazz.
My books are Future Jazz (Oxford U Press, 1999) and Miles Ornette Cecil - Jazz Beyond Jazz (Routledge, 2008). I was general editor of the Illustrated Encyclopedia of Jazz and Blues (Flame Tree 2005/Billboard Books 2006). Of course I'm working on something new. . . Read More…

About Jazz Beyond Jazz

What if there's more to jazz than you suppose? What if jazz demolishes suppositions and breaks all bounds? What if jazz - and the jazz beyond, behind, under and around jazz - could enrich your life?
What if jazz is the subtle, insightful, stylish, … [Read More...]

@JazzMandel

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Interviews & Articles

Reviewing a sleeping giant, ESP Disks before its early '00s revival
Howard Mandel c 1997, published in issue 157, The Wire
It was a time before psychedelics. Following the seismic cultural disruptions of the mid '50s, rock 'n' roll had hit a … [Read More...]

Howard Mandel c 1998/published by DownBeat, July 1998, under headline Beneath the Underdog (the editor's reference to Charles Mingus's autobiography):
There's an anchor for New York's downtown free jazz and improv "wild bunch": his name is William … [Read More...]

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This is a complete version of the feature on pianist Matthew Shipp I wrote for The Wire, published in February, 1998
Is this the face of New York's jazz avant now? Pianist Matt … [Read More...]

Miles Davis
intended On The Corner to be a
personal statement, an esthetic breakthrough and a social provocation upon its
release in fall of 1972. He could hardly have been more successful: the album
was all that, though it has taken decades for its … [Read More...]